Samuel Beckett

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Samuel Beckett is one of the most important and influential playwrights of the twentieth century. It looks at how in most of his plays, he reflects an existential feeling that life is essentially absurd and that the only positive elements in it are discovered through the creativity of individuals who attempt to create meaning or else use humor to deal with this absurdity. It analyzes how death also receives a similar treatment in his plays and while the reality of death is exceptionally sad in its terrible finality, it is also dealt with in a humorous fashion. It evaluates how this combination of sadness and humor lead Beckett himself to label his own plays as "tragicomic," since these contradictory elements of tragedy and comedy seem to appear at the same in the same amount often in the same passage. It shows how Beckett's portrayal of the reality of human death is at once hysterical and depressing, whimsical and terrible, as he embraces both the absurdity of life through human creation and mourns the inability of human to triumph completely over those limitations.

From the Paper:

"Fittingly, in his play Waiting for Godot, his characters deal with death in a fashion that is both absurd and laments the true tragedy of the brevity and absurdity in their lives. Indeed, early in the play, the characters are considering what they should do with themselves since they are bored by the repetition of days in the strange and unnamed place where the scene is set. In this moment, Vladimir and Estragon decide that they might choose to hang themselves from the tree that is in the center of the stage. While this suggestion of suicide may seem quite grim, it is in reality extremely comic, since the tree is so small and pathetic that it could never hold a man's weight enough for him to be hanged. In a way, this joke about death is little more than a game that the two characters use to pass the time and one that results in great comedy."

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